From Combat to Kentucky Oral History Project

The Nunn Center has produced an informational video about the From Combat to Kentucky Oral History Project.  From Combat to Kentucky: Interviews with Student Veterans is an award-winning oral history project that documents the stories of veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan who are currently pursuing post-secondary education in Kentucky. The project features a web site,   http://www.c2ky.org  with student-veteran video interviews. These Kentuckians share their stories of military service and civilian life before and after war. The interviews highlight the difficult transition from military life to student life and illustrate the student veterans’ unique college experience.

Saving Stories for UK Founders Day Features Interview About Campus in 1902

The latest episode of Saving Stories on WUKY is in celebration of University of Kentucky’s Founders Day.  Alan Lytle and Doug Boyd feature a clip of a 1975 interview with former student T.R. Bryant who talks in great detail about UK’s campus in 1902.  Thomas R. “T.R.” Bryant first came to the University of Kentucky in 1902 after winning a scholarship through a competitive examination held by the county superintendent. Bryant graduated in four years and obtained his first staff job at the university in 1908 as an assistant in animal science. Throughout this interview, Bryant discusses life on campus both as a student and staff member.  Also being discussed in this episode of Saving Stories, we discuss the kickoff of UK’s sesquicentennial celebration:    Listen to the episode

Image: Exterior view of Neville Hall when it was a new dormitory. Purchased February 17, 1986. Photographer: Edgar C. Loevenhart. b / w, 5.5 inches by 6.5 inches.

Saving Stories Features Ezell Blair, Jr: Remembering the Greensboro Sit-Ins

This episode of Saving Stories reflects on a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement documented in a powerful oral history interview archived at the Nunn Center. This episode features an oral history interview with Ezell Blair Jr., one of the young college students who, in 1960, defiantly demanded service at a Woolworth’s Department Store lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.  While this was not the first time a sit-in was conducted as a means of social protest, media coverage of this particular event sparked similar sit-ins around the country.  The Greensboro lunch counter sit-in created the model for local, nonviolent protest movements against discrimination with regard to public accommodations.

In this episode, Blair discusses the origins of the idea, their motivation behind the protest, as well as the aftermath of the sit-in.

Listen to the Episode

To hear the entire oral history interview, go to SPOKE, the Nunn Center’s online catalog of oral histories.

Nunn Center Launches Haiti Memory Project

Two years after Haiti was rocked by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake near Port au Prince, I would like to announce the Haiti Memory Project, a project to record and preserve oral histories with over 100 survivors of the earthquake in Haiti.http://www.haitimemoryproject.org

The Haiti Memory Project is the brainchild of Claire Antone Payton, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and Institute of French Studies at NYU, where she focuses on Haitian history. Beginning in 2011, Payton partnered with our center (the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries), to house, preserve,digitize and make available to the public this important historical collection of narratives.  The Haiti Memory Project explores life in the Caribbean country before and after the earthquake. The project’s interviews offer Haitians the opportunity to tell their own story of what has happened to their homeland. While almost all of the interviews reference the earthquake, many of the accounts focus on life after the event, including life in refugee camps. Interviews range from 30 minutes to approximately two hours and reflect such topics as politics, culture, medicine, religion and attitudes toward foreigners. Payton collected the interviews between June and December 2010.

The Nunn Center intends for the oral history project to be accessible to researchers around the world via the Internet and provide Haitians access to this pivotal moment in their history. Our hope is to present these interviews online using the Nunn Center’s OHMS system for search and discovery.  To browse the Haiti Memory project collection in SPOKE, the Nunn Center’s online catalog of interview, go to http://www.kentuckyoralhistory.org.

To learn more about this amazing project take a look at a recent news story: http://www.kyforward.com/?p=7748